Screen Capture: September 6, 2013 - Scott Carroll Lecture

Just short of the opening of Washington DC's new Museum of the Bible, journalist Kelly Crow has published an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal where she outlines recent conversations with former Museum of the Bible antiquities advisor, Scott Carroll, and founder of the national retail chain Hobby Lobby and Chairman of the Board of the Museum of the Bible, Steve Green.  

Green is the driving force behind his family’s private collection of rare biblical texts and artifacts, which purportedly includes somewhere between 44,000 - 50,000 objects depending on whom you as.  Only a small portion of this private collector's objects will make up the core collection which will go on display later this week at the opening of Washington DC's Museum of the Bible. 

Speaking with the journalist, Carroll significantly downplayed the importance of his role in the Greens' antiquities purchases telling the WSJ that it was his job to flag potential objects for purchase, the family eventually greenlighted.   Carroll is even quoted as saying “had no idea an acquisition had been made until the items showed up.” After one trip to Dubai, which according to Carroll's Facebook page occurred between January 11 and January 16, 2010, he claims that he informed Steve Green to end the purchase negotiations because of “issues of provenance.”

But this seeming care for the ethical collecting of antiquities, doesn't quite match up to previous statements Carroll has made publicly in the past.  

In March 2012, while still affiliated with the Green family, Scott Carroll gave several quotes for an article in the Toledo Blade that implied a much more active role in the purchase of the Green's antiquities, as well as his roll for looking for other potential collector/donors.

In that article he was quoted as saying: 

“We are rapidly acquiring at the same pace we have been over the last several years and have the green light as well to nurture new, additional benefactors,...” 

“I fully anticipate developing a few more benefactors over the course of the next year or so that will perhaps acquire at the pace of the Greens, and this collection will continue to expand at this rate.”

“We’ve been extremely careful to vet everything acquired and are fully aware of the issues and problems,...”

“I work closely with international and national agencies reporting suspicious items that come our way.”

“I tell the Greens that I trust them to know where to put a store, and they need to trust me to stock the shelves,...”

If Green worked closely with international and national agencies, why was his 2010 concerns about the Dubai purchases not relayed to the federal authorities?

Digging further, in a 98-minute lecture on September 6, 2013 at the University of the Nations, published to YouTube and transcribed below in its entirety, there were several more eye-opening statements which clearly portray Carroll as more than someone merely following the orders of the Greens.

It is enlightening to read the entire transcript though I have highlighted portions which emphasize his role in setting up some of these collections.

• Date: September 6, 2013 - Scott Carroll Lecture
• Event Location: University of the Nations, San Antonio Del Mar, Mexico
• Video Length: 1 hour and 38 minutes.
• Translated by Madison King – August 01, 2017
• 2nd Translation and verification by Lynda Albertson – August 02, 2017

- Check against delivery
– Seul le texte prononcé fait foi,

--start of transcript  

Opener: My name is David and I have the privilege of starting us off this evening, and I want to welcome all of you who have come. I would encourage you to probably get in as close as you can on either side because we are going to see some amazing treasures rolled out here on the tables. And you’re here to see things and have them explained that, ah, you’ve never seen before.

We want to welcome everyone who’s watching this streaming. And we’ve been having some amazing days here, during the workshop, and what we are experiencing is, god is calling us to more in several different categories. And one of the things is, ah, a greater love and appreciation and engagement with the word of god.

And, uh, having Dr. Scott Carroll here is a such a wonderful gift. We have already done in previous sessions an introduction to him, but you know he is a man of god with incredible skills in all of these things of antiquities and in ancient manuscripts. As understanding some of the cutting edge technologies too…that are producing some of the archeological discoveries of these days, and understanding the languages of the ancient world. What I love when I get together with this man is his heart, to help people really understand how trustworthy and reliable god’s word is.

And he makes a lot of very amazing academic data accessible for all of us to understand in a transformative way. So, uh, Scott we welcome you this evening. It’s a delight to have you and Denise here with us and, ah, you know your honorary YWAMers [Note: this is an acronym for Youth With A Mission - YWAM] already in our midst. We just…(inaudible)… we just love and appreciate you. So, let’s just commit this time to the lord.

• Prayer: Jesus thank you. Thank you for your word. Thank you for the way it has been given, and passed on over the centuries. And I pray that this evening as Scott shares with us that you’ll meet us again. And make your word come alive, so that we can, uh, engage with it and then extend your kingdom.  Blessings on Scott. Amen.

• Scott: Thank you.  Oh I have this. Thank you very much. It’s great to be here. And I want to thank you all for the sacrifice of your time. I hope there might be one thing that you leave that you’ll remember (laughs) when you breathe your last breath. (laughs) That’s a tall order. (laughs)  I hope to challenge you tonight. (laughs). Thank you for your help. How many of you were with me earlier today? Thank you, I’d like you to teach the class tonight. (laughs)

Would you mind and pardon me to teach some of the same material again? I think it might be beneficial to repeat it for you, helpful for the people in the streaming video, and also for the rest of the class. You’ve become my students for two hours. There will be a test at the end of this period. The test is, I told the students from earlier, is that when you go out this door and enter life, because we don’t learn or teach for entertainment, but to seek before god, tools and skills that can impact ourselves in the world.

So, I’ll divide our evening tonight into several parts. One would be kind of to describe who I am and my background. Because I have a kind of strange pilgrimage. It’ll help you better understand the things that I do.

Then I’d like to briefly describe some of the discoveries that have been made. And of course we will take time to look hands on, on many of these things.

So I’d ask as things are passed around that you remember they’re real. If you have liquids, that you will put them down on the ground, that you’ll be very careful as you pass them from one person to another. And there will be scrolls that we will roll out across the middle. And when we do, we'll look at them together. So I’ll have you draw in on the middle, so that I can point things out.

In some ways, I hope to be as a teacher, your eyes, so that you learn to see things the same way that I see things. It’s a part of learning.

So, you’ll begin with learning a bit about me. We will talk a bit about discoveries. We will certainly look at some materials and, uh, finally I have some words of, ummm, spiritual encouragement that I’d like to breathe into you.

Well with that said, let me get my computer going. A faithful, trustful ma…, uh, PC. Given straight from heaven. (laughs)

Ah, let’s see here, one second. All right, thank you.

Ah, I will begin here and I, as with the earlier seminar, would just like to call this reason to believe.

I, there’s a double entendre with that saying. So, the idea that God has both given us both reason and I believe he’s kissed us with evidence. Like an incarnation of sorts, and with that, with that said, this for me is like my work space. And the man holding his head was a very famous scholar at Cambridge of Hebrew manuscripts.

And I understand what he smells, what he sees, and why the poor man’s holding his head. Literally in this collection, for those who are biblical scholars in here, this is the famous Cairo Genizah. [NOTE: The Cairo Genizah is a collection of some 300,000 Jewish manuscript fragments that were found in the genizah, or storeroom, of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, or Old Cairo, Egypt.]  It took well over a hundred years to work through this material. I know both the joy, the thrill, and the anguish of this.

This is typically what my desk looks like. OK, tell me, the same?

OK, my Phd is in a very narrow, unmarketable area. (laughs) Yes, it’s not posted normally on monster.com.

My training is in ancient languages, archeology, history. I think that we were required in my program to have 13 ancient languages, of which some I read well, others I don’t.

Ah, because of my language skills I work with unknown ancient manuscripts. I suspect I have seen more things, my wife, my lovely wife is here. I suspect I have seen as much or more than anybody alive.

So I see unusual texts all the time. All the time. So I’m very comfortable in an undefined setting. Um, I like looking at things that are unknown.

Because of my language training, people with collections began to come to me from Europe. And they wanted to know what they had. They would have collections passed down by relatives. Of course defining what you had brought value to it.

So it opened up to me a world of collectors and items. And so for over 30 years I’ve been working with collections of this sort. I have also had the privilege to meet people who collect such things. They’re wealthy people who have strong passions about collections. Which can be problematic if it’s mixed with issues of religion.

Strong passions, money, power. Um, I’ve been blessed in my career to build the largest collection of biblical manuscripts in the world. 

Twice.

And, um, it has meant this last time, spending over 70 million dollars in three years. And assembling over 55 thousand items. And this means building around that, the scholarship necessary, academic associations, and, um, exhibits for the public.

So, ah, it’s a lot of work, but it, it’s what god has done in my life. So we’ve expanded these things and worked in these areas …(inaudible)… Um, it has furthered my knowledge of items that are out there to be acquired.

Up until a year and a half ago, I was commissioned by very wealthy families to represent their interests buying things. So I would go into a collection like this, and literally, I see these things every three weeks like that. And in a matter of a day, sort through everything of interest, assess its value, talk to the collector, offer some money, and acquire everything. Knowing exactly what its financial value would be at auction.

A year and a half ago we shifted to work with the seller and not the buyer. Our services were gladly welcomed by people who had things. Because oftentimes they sold things, almost always not knowing what they had. Let’s say a little text like this.

This was originally a roll. I showed portions of it at Kona several months ago. Since that time it’s been apportioned out properly. This came from a mummy mask. And the person who owned it would have been happy to sell it for a small amount, but we knew that the text inside was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars more. So my representing the collector brings value to them. And I work with a team of people who do.  So we all specialize in different languages; different writing styles, different texts, and everyone is the best person in the world at what they do.

And we go through a pile like that, maybe in Istanbul, Tel Aviv, the UK, and in a matter of days, know exactly what’s of value inside that collection. I’ll tell you right now that biblical texts came out of the pile, and this happens on a regular basis, so this is my job as a professor.

I’m going to ask my wife, and if we can go table to table with this, and I’ll let her handle it because this is worth just under two million dollars. Ah, this work is an author quoted in the New Testament. Only three other texts of this play survive in the world. This, ah, this is the earliest of the four, three others and this, by 800 years. This is the earliest writing in Greek you will ever see in your life. Because it’s survived in a mummy mask, uh, it, was preserved. And  uh, that’s why it’s as early as it is.

It, it is a witness to the kind of writing from the lost library of Alexandria. So when we look at this pretend, I mean for real understanding, that you are seeing writing from the lost library of Alexandria.

And it’s an example of just the work I do, that’s all I’m showing it to you for. Now while she’s going around with that, let me continue to show you some other things I do.

Ah, this is myself lecturing at Cambridge University. Professors, they don’t like to be lectured to.

Uh, I’m with a friend who published the dead sea scrolls, …(inaudible).. I’m the one with the hair. (laughs)

Um, we did an exhibit a year ago in St. Peter’s Square, at St. Peter’s Basilica. You can see a banner, black, beige, black, on the left. It goes all the way back to St. Peter’s Basilica.  I’m not the one with the hat. (laughs)  But you can see the exhibit on the right.

It was the largest exhibit on the Bible, ever, at the Vatican. I’m just trying to help you understand the odd things I do.

You remember, when this was being planned, we were together at Cunningham’s. Praise God, huh, it happened, huh!

So this is me, not the one with the red hat. And I’m with the director of the Vatican library. This is part of the exhibit showing cardinals and archbishops at the exhibit.

The book that was written on the exhibit was given to the Pope and distributed to all of the cardinals. And some went many times to the exhibit. Some, ah, went, they, ah, viewed and I’m going to show you things today that would be the kinds of things that would have been on exhibit at the Vatican.

This may be very hard for you to understand, but the scrolls that were exhibited there, were so overwhelming in their spiritual presence, people fell on their face, were slain by their presence, of the scrolls, it’s just unbelievable.  They would go in, tens of thousands in a day pressing in, and people falling down and people stumbling over ‘em! (laughs)

So, ah, and then there is an exhibit in the US that we had that we created that is travelling the US.

Now where do I find these things? I said that some are found in mummy masks, watch this before you buy any on eBay.

Um, I do dissolve texts from mummy masks. The masks in some places were made using discarded papyrus. But we know that the time they did that, the place they did that, and the language it was written in. For the most part they have nothing in them, and the process that we’ve developed is a proprietary process. My wife will laugh and say she remembers the times we started, that she would walk into the house and smell mummy on the stove. (laughs) Nothing like the smell of mummy on the stove. (laughs)

Oh, so we start with this ooooooh, yeah sometimes that’s what’s inside. Actually, no there are no bodies inside, but this is an example of the papyrus on the inside, that was used like papier-mâché. And so let me show you here and give you an example of how this works.

This will only take a minute. This was done at Baylor University where I had an appointment. And it’ll show you just very quickly the, um, a process that actually lasted six to eight hours.

The solution that’s used is a special solution that won’t, um, destroy the ink. You’ll see the outside of this gradually go away and you might say what a destructive process, but I would remind you that all archaeology is a destructive process.

Uh, we actually have--I’m working with a professor in the US on a polymer that is placed as an application over the outside of the mask and preserves it intact while we extract the inside.

So here we are gradually dissolving the mask. And this will take a few minutes, you’ll gradually see portions of the text appear and the face disappear.  They would put a piece of linen over where the face was.

See text beginning to come out and the face goin’ away. Oh, that’s not my hands with the bracelet. (laughs)

This per…(inaudible)…with the masks that we target, are masks that date after the time of the Library of Alexandria. They’re Greco-Roman masks because they will yield Greek texts. So this is 150 B.C. Did we go past it?

So did you see at the end all of the texts laid out? Those texts fit into an entire scroll, or half a scroll. Now I, I should say to you, that, one second (laughs) oh crud…let’s see, let’s do it this way, sorry. Um. Oftentimes the text that are found are just common everyday texts. But five percent are important.

Ah, we found last year, I found the earliest known text of Romans, the earliest known texts of First Samuel, lost works of Sappho, tons of Homer. So this is one area where we find text, another area, is working with technology and patents. You can see the text is actually a recycling of a text. The text that’s in black, is actually, you’re viewing upside down, but you see the two columns that are underneath that are faint. So how do you read the column that’s the two columns underneath?

With a professor at Oxford, developed a scan across the light spectrum, 20 different stops. And pixel by pixel made a decision about the best, the best way to view each box.

Look closely at the text, now this is the application of our process. The text that you’re looking at now is the earliest account of the last supper in Jesus’s language. The, this manuscript is 300 pages long.

So we work with mummy masks, we work with piles of ancient texts, and with ancient technology, and with technology with ancient texts.

Here’s another one real fast. 800 pages, completely damaged by water. Said to the same optical physicist from Ukraine, professor at Oxford. How do you think we might be able to see this? Do you think maybe the stylus of the scribe left an indentation in the parchment?

He took a few seconds and drew a picture, he said I’ll get back to you in two weeks. He said let’s look closely at this area. He bathed it with lasers, and was able to create a shadow in the grooves.

Ok so there’s a text. There’s the area that we are looking at, there’s his process. (laughs) I really have a fun job! (laughs) So it’s a use of technology, and the use of contacts, working with things. If you ever think to pray for us, please do!
Someone said, well what’s your ministry, coming by our booth.  I, I don’t know. We kind of do research and stuff. All right, now let me very quickly show you discoveries that have been made in the last year and a half.

OK, ah, we’re looking at 14 texts of Homer, including one of the earliest known texts of Homer ever found, including a very early text of Homer found yesterday.

Ah, I don’t know if you know who Sappho is but, but, look what I’ll briefly go down on this list. What you need to understand is the Times, the London Times Literary Supplement, that thirty of these items would be front page news when they’re published. Just, so, we have Sappho here, we have, ah, Euripides who’s quoted by Jesus in the New Testament.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a text of Euripides to display. I have one from a mummy mask and my wife will pass it around. It’s interesting to know that the New Testament authors use popular culture. Jesus quotes from a tragedian poet while he’s knocking Saul off his burro, and Sa…and Saul the Pharisian [sic] Sanhedrin understands the texts that’s being quoted.

The other text that was passed around, Menander, was quoted by Paul. Ah, so we have accounts by Plato, accounts by Aristotle, this account by Demosthenes was written within, within 20 years of his death.

Ah, all kinds, I figure about 65 classical texts discovered in the last year and a half. Biblical, Biblical manuscripts, dead sea scrolls. Um, I had mentioned this as well, this is, this is a month ago. A leather robe, worn by a high priest in Israel, dating 100 years after Daniel, written with Aramaic scripture around the collar.
I, I hope you understand how unbelievable that it is. I’m sorry I didn’t bring it with me, (laughs). We’re still working on it.

These are all texts of Genesis, of Exodus. We have the earliest text of Exodus 24 here. Um, so, earliest, yeah there’s nothing earlier in the world. This is the earliest in the world. And you might not believe it, or you wonder how do you know.

Please understand that the world I work in, people demand that you know. No one will pay 1.1 million dollars for that text that is in his hands, unless you know for sure it dates to when it dates to. The Vatican library will not want to do an exhibition with you unless you know the dates of something. So, if you look on the screen you see texts discovered of almost, well many of the Old Testament books. With New Testament books, most of the gospels. Including a first century text of the Gospel of Mark. That’s the earliest, that will be the earliest text of the New Testament.

• Audience Question, …(inaudible)…most people would not…(inaudible) what was the oldest …(inaudible)…

The earliest text of the New Testament before that was of the Gospel of John and dated somewhere between 120 and 140 AD. We’re looking now at a text of Mark that dates between 70 and 110. And there’s even something more important than that. That I’ve not even told David Hamilton and I’m not going to.

But I do have here, the earliest text of Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb of Jesus. And if you look carefully at the bottom of the writing, clear written page, at the end of the second to last line to the right, is the, is the name Maria, and then on the bottom left, the bottom line on the far left is Magdalene. Alright, um, there are early texts of Luke, I have the second earliest text.

Scott, that’s the oldest.

That’s the oldest anywhere in the world of that portion of Matthew 27 and 28. Ah, while we’re passing around texts, this is the earliest text in the world of Luke 16. And the second earliest text of the gospel of Luke. Please make sure I get them all back. Um, there are texts of every conceivable book. I was with my wife eating Thai in Oklahoma City when I got a text from a, from a collector in the Middle East. It was a box of broken papyrus. While we ate our good food, I noticed that the text was all written by the same hand. Looked like some of the pieces may fit together.  Thought it looked like 1 Corinthians. Turned out to be 20 pages of 1 Corinthians. Under, it’s now owned by a German collector. It was appraised for over 7 million dollars, and sold for somewhat less than that. Underneath that text was this. And two weeks ago I had time to look at that. Two weeks ago. And it turns out to be the earliest text of Timothy in any text. So let me pass this around as well.

…(inaudible)…Audience Question

Oh Codex, a codex is from the Latin word for book, so these things are scrolls. Many of you are looking at texts that have no writing on the back, they were scrolls. Christians popularized the mechanism of the book. It actually became a visual image of Jesus himself. It was economical because you could write on both sides of the writing material, apart from a scroll mentioned in Ezekiel in Revelation written on both sides, which was very uncommon. They would usually write on one.

So still looking at our thing, oh, in addition now to twenty pages in 1 Corinthians, two months ago I found--my wife is giving me a signal.

Yeah, yeah, no pictures of the papyrus please, they’re not published. We have, just understand the value of these things are enormous. There are, ah, professors who, from North America would send students here.  They would pay their tickets and send them here, to do two things: to take pictures of the texts for them to publish, and number two to discredit you and us because they’re in your hands.

We found also 2 Corinthians chapter 6 through Galatians 3, so these are big finds, I think over 2…over 200 texts biblical texts, of one sort or another of importance. And the rest of the stuff is just other stuff we worked on discovering.

Alright so! I won’t labor this--belabor this more than to show you some quick pictures of these things. So these are--these are of Homer. This is Sappho, more stuff, more stuff, more stuff.

Genesis, here I was showing some in the earlier class. Can you see my…here this is Ishmael, the earliest text in the world of Genesis 17. This is Mo…mosis…Moses, this is Exodus. Pharaoh…pharaha…pharaoh, these are fragments of Numbers and Deuteronomy, Genesis and Leviticus. This is unbelievable.

Ok, first you can see Jezebel here right?

This is the earliest text of 2 Kings 9. But see up here, ánthrōpos, man, person. You might not see down here if you don’t know Greek, this is child, paideía. This text came from a mummy mask. Here’s ánthrōpos, their, and it turns out to be the earliest and only second known text, early text, of 1 Samuel. The person being mentioned is, ah, Samuel’s mother, praying for her child.  That’s the child being mentioned, and that’s what’s preserved in the text.

Audience question.  What was under it?

What was under it? Homer’s Iliad, (laughs) I love it! It’s classical text, biblical text, all put together in a mummy!

Texts of psalms. We had mentioned this with David Hamilton yesterday. This is the earliest text of Psalm 3 and 4. You can see it’s written in a book form. So who used it, Jews or Christians? Christians did, right.

Text of, ah, Psalms, text. People ask me often, the most incredible thing I’ve discovered. Very wisely I say, having met my wife in high school. (laughs) Yeah, there she is. Actually, the most moving discovery was this text of Isiah on the left. The second earliest known text of Isiah in the world. It’s in the messianic section and tell me why, that God kissed us to discover it on Good Friday. It’s just…In my home office.

Audience question …(inaudible) You had mentioned that…(inaudible)….classics with some of the…(inaudible)….was it likely …(inaudible)…

Yes. Ya, completely unintentional. They sent some young mortuary priest, out to the dump and gathered up whatever scraps he could pick.

Audience question …(inaudible)

No, it, discarded papyri, that’s it. One community had discarded Samuel and the other community discarded Homer and they end up together in the mortuary. But isn’t that so surprising about their culture. Living together, interfacing, these texts and all. Wow, it’s neat.

Audience question …(inaudible)

Yeah, it was thrown away and they used it as garbage, recycled. Literacy was clearly not as high, certainly higher among the Jews. Perhaps as high as 30% among the Greeks in Alexandria.  Over a thousand known books were discovered amongst the Dead Sea scrolls. And many unidentified fragments. If you’ve ever been there, in the desert, a library of ten thousand, a library of thousands of books.  So they did have texts, but literacy was not as high as what it is today.

Okay, so on the left up here, right now, until Mark was published, is the second earliest text of the New Testament. But it’s…but it’s not published yet. This. So no one in the world knows about it.  It’s Matthew 12. On the righthand side is also Matthew and Luke dating to around 150. On the lefthand side, again unpublished, is the earliest account of the nativity of Jesus. Luke 2 dating to around 140. On the right hand side is Luke 12 dating to before 200. On and on and on. This is an early text of John 3. On the left up there is the earliest text of Acts 19, the revival in Ephesus.

Audience speaking…(inaudible) that’s are devotions tomorrow morning.

Yeah. Really? Well this is the, ah, so you don’t need to go, this is the speech of Demetrius. On the righthand side is an early magical text. The kind that they would have burned. Earliest text of Romans found in a mummy mask.  Earliest of Romans 14. This--I’m almost done and then we’re gonna look at scrolls. This is the earliest copy of any of Paul’s writings. 1 Corinthians 9, uh, this…sorry?

Audience Question

Uh, that dates around 150, 140-160 something like that. Now if you can look at this and imagine 1 Corinthians in 20 pages that’s what it looks like. And then 2 Corinthians 6 to Galatians 3 is another 15 pages, 35 pages of scripture.

Audience question

It was found in a box. No…yeah…dating. It’s done--each of the specialists in the language work with the paleography and then set a plus or minus 30 or 40 years.

Audience question.

Paleography is the minute changes in writing, when I roll…I’ll show you with the scroll when I roll it out.

Audience question

You can but too much is destroyed. Not as much, not as much is gained as we know by the handwriting. Furthermore, the carbon dating will just tell you the date of the object not the writing. We have some other ideas that we are working with our people, like the Ukrainian guy, but were not there yet.

All right, early text of Ephesians, early text of Hebrews. I mean…okay, by the way this is what a letter would look like. So, you think of Philemon, Onesimus, they would be carrying a little thing like this. All right, there’s too much to talk about. Let me…I would like to roll out a scroll and let the scroll speak to us about how it was written and created. And point out some things as I see with the scrolls.

I want you to understand that the largest collection of scrolls in private hands ten years ago was about 100. And I had the privilege of organizing that. Now the largest collection is--I also had the privilege of organizing--is 4,500 scrolls.

So, we’ve been blessed to work with scrolls. A lot of things that we learn and we talk about, about how God’s word was transmitted. We talk about things we think happened with scrolls. We say when the, don’t we, when the scribe copied the name for God, he washed himself, changed his pen, changed his ink. How many have heard that before?

Sure. Of over five thousand scrolls I’ve looked at carefully, I’ve only seen one where that’s evidenced.

Now it may be more, I have a close friend who is a Jewish scribe. How about the one where if they’ve made a mistake or two mistakes or three mistakes they would destroy…they would either destroy the skin or destroy the scroll. Anybody hear that?

Sometimes we create these legends that we think gives authority to the Bible. I think it is very important that, ah, teachers of God’s word have a clear understanding, how God preserved his own word.

Like many of you, I live in a Muslim context. I have a number of friends who are Muslim. So often I hear of stories of Christians going in and not being able to answer questions of errors and variations and translations in the Bible. And what I’d like to show you is just what the evidence says.

We don’t need to make up pharositical rules and laws and regulations around the scripture. I often think about scripture being like a humongous T-Rex and I’m at the very toe of its claw, right at the end of the claw, and I have a wisp of straw in my hands and the wisp is broken. And as people come near the T-Rex I say don’t worry, stand away, I’ll protect you. And the T-Rex, God in his omnipotence smiles and says Go at it boy. (laughs) You know you’ve heard the expression before “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” That’s completely wrong. It’s just “God said it, that settles it” It doesn’t matter whether we believe it or not that makes it right. Right, so what I’d like to do here is, ah, maybe before rolling out the scroll I have an Isaiah scroll with me. As far as I now there are less than 10 of these in the world. Even that date to this modern time.

The earliest text that we have on how a synagogue operated is Luke 4. Jesus as second Adam comes victorious out of the wilderness. He goes into the synagogue, now they had a special person and they still do, who rolls the scroll to the right place.

They don’t have chapters or verses. In fact, I will open this to 53 approximately and hold it on its sides on…by the curls here and pass it around. And why don’t you…you each look at it carefully. Why don’t we do it for sake of time 2 at a time, look at it together.

So, Jesus and Luke IV comes into the synagogue. The scroll is opened up. We know from later sources exactly the order of reading of texts that supported the Torah. If those medieval rules were in place in the time of Jesus we can predict actually the day that he was in the synagogue.

Now while it gives chapter and verses today for the readings. There are no chapters and verses in the scroll. So, the way the rules worked is you could read anywhere it was opened to.

You tracking with me on this? So, we think that the reading was Isaiah 58 but it was opened wide enough for Jesus to come up and read 61 which was a proclamation about his own authority. So, can you see that happening, do you understand that?

As 53 is going around, you think of the Ethiopian unit pondering on this. So, it’s all of great interest.

Let me ask my wife to be of help with me on this, please. And we are going to roll out a scroll. If you’ll hold onto this end, I’m going to take it down. This scroll is--you can tell a different color, than the other one that was rolled out. It’s done in calfskin just like the other one. Um, except this is dyed.

This process was done by people called Sephardic Jews and it’s, ah, slightly different than the other process. And what I’ll ask you to do is, if you imagine each…each of these are skins. Are you on the end there? Yeah, great. Pull it all the way to your way please. Yeah, great. These are made with skins. They would process the skin. They would line it. They would put pinholes down the sides. They ran strings across it. They lined it with a dull knife. They made their own ink. They would take a quill, oftentimes a quill made from goose feather and they would sit and begin to write and it would take one year.

The first time I had the opportunity to work with an ancient manuscript, I was in a collection and holding it and turned to the Gospel of John, and I read that the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

And for me it was nearly a sacramental protestant moment. You know, I’m holding this and I was thinking, what would an ancient person think. So, you’re looking at kind of a living text, now when I call you to come up, and I want to make sure that the papyrus is away, and, uh, we will have opportunity to finish out with Isaiah, trust me. Or you can come to see if afterwards.

I don’t want to drop or stumble over anything when we come up, a stampede to the altar or something. Ah, but, I would like you to come up to look at certain things.

And I’ll go to the end and you gather on both sides and there will be far too many people over here so go on both sides and even out. And I’ll start asking you to look for certain things.

Okay, come, come along. Go ahead. Anywhere. If…now I don’t know if we can, ah (inaudible)--is there any way to get different lighting in here, so they can see better? Let there be light? They’re saying no. Let there be light.  No? No, that’s it, alright, okay.

As you look at this, first on the edge, not on the ink, but on the edge go ahead and feel. Can you see the faint hints of lines? The pe…the people on my left are looking at it properly.  You probably noticed that people on the right…right…yeah?

I want you to look to tell me if you see any small circles in the columns in between. Does anybody see any small circles? Say here if you see any.  Here? Any others? Do you see them? Let me tell you what they are. Those are all corrections, made by a…they are marks for corrections made by a corrector. You can oftentimes see the correction in the text itself corresponding to it.

This particular manuscript was first copied around 1400, I’ve already said I’ve worked with a lot, right. You trust me? There may be 30 in the world earlier. So, we have a very early testimony here.

Those circles were not made by the original scribe. How many of you wear glasses in here, you can’t see without them. Eyeglasses were invented about the time this scroll was written. So, I know you do. So, even today they copy and correct and correct--how many of you…how many of you would put the quill down and walk away and say I got it right.

I don’t think so and please understand that the people who are marking in the columns are the sons and grandsons and great grandsons of the original scribe. Yes! It’s a family tradition. Imagine them correcting the writing of their father that’s been read in the synagogue.

But don’t ever again presume that these texts were passed around magically without mistake! Better than that, they were corrected! God, God used our frail inabilities and worked with us.

We’re...This, this isn’t the Koran. See this is the Bible, God working graciously through fallen people to protect his word. So you don’t need to create or continue far-fetched stories that don’t match the evidence.

Now you…you probably can see many erasures as you look at it and corrections. Here, they’re--they’re all over the place. But…but, you know, it’s often not more than one or two a column. And actually when all of the manuscripts are compared, 98 percent of them are the same.

But does that--but do we need to create some kind of unrealistic, superstitious, kind of argument for the preservation of the scriptures? No. The, um, the breaks that you see, in between the lines, are sections. They’re ruled by tradition as well. It’s one of the ways that we date how early a particular manuscript is.

And…and they all…in the synagogue, read the same passages, from end to end throughout the Torah every year. You might…you might see on the left hand side of every column, do you see letters that are extended and made long? Down there at the end, do you see some?

The reason they’re doing that is to make sure they justify the line and stay exactly on the same line as they copy the text down. It’s a lot, it’s an internal way of making sure it’s copied correctly.

Now, this is the most moving part of the Torah. If I can…if you…if you all will just move here for me. You’re at the end of Genesis here--if we move this, go ahead and give me some slack, by the way the lighting is bad, but we’ve got two different scribes here.

Do you see the two different writings themselves? The parchments are different. What’s happened is they’ve had some kind of damage on the original scroll and replaced it with a slightly later scroll.

Look at that big correction. Sometimes they actually will, um, this is okay here. That’s good, right there. Sometimes they will actually cut out text. Um, this is the Ten Commandments, and this is the most important part of scripture.

It’s…it’s…um, written like poetry and it’s actually called the song of the sea, written by a woman, alright men. And they have it laid out like a brick wall. Because it symbolized to them a truth that would stand like a wall. That God would destroy his people’s enemies and deliver his people. And so they are not gonna write it the same way, they are gonna write it to look like a brick wall. I challenge you to take your favorite verse and write it like a brick wall.

So there are all sorts of interesting facets I could talk to you about with the creation of the scroll. What I’d like to do is overlay on top of this the other scroll. We’ll take time for pictures, hold tight here. Denise could you get that one? Thank you. If you bring it down here, please. This is the one that was laid out in yesterday’s. Thanks.

Audience Question

This--the one on the bottom was written around 1400-1450. But where we have the transition here it’s about 1500-1550. You’re back to 1450 here, but back to 1550 there. Do you see the difference? It’s just an area where it’s been corrected. Alright. So pass that up there.

Audience question …(inaudible)

No, no, the Septuagint was copied, ah, well it wasn’t always, those of you that saw--that’s good there--those of you that saw the exodus it was a scroll.  So it was done as a scroll. But, but it would never be read like this in a synagogue, so it was different.

I do know by the way, the Jewish traditions of the Middle Ages, but they applied to how they copy books and I think how they hope to copy scrolls.

What is it, have you heard the expression before, that you have, ah, oh I’ve forgotten, day, um, according to law and according to reality, the Latin phrase. I don’t know, but the issue is often in life we have like one thing that we express that things really are, but then there’s the way things really are and there not always the same. Alright let me move this way please.

Alright there are a couple mechanisms on this scroll that are really interesting. The handwriting is slightly different because it’s a different tradition. This is open to another song, called the song of Moses, which is right here.

Some of you will notice that in the last column there’s a large Alif, A. Do you see how it’s larger than the other letters? This happens throughout certain scrolls, where they will make letters larger to emphasize a verse.

Here’s something else that they did…some of you who are standing here with me can see that all these letters have dots on top of them. Can you see those?
They would mark words and phrases and there are only a few with dots to show that there may be a problem with that word in the original text. But they never change the word. Never. So, they mark it and by tradition maintain the accuracy of the marking without, it’s a great way to argue for the accuracy of the text because they wouldn’t change it, they would mark it. It’s just really cool.

Audience Question ...(inaudible)

No, the vowel points don’t occur in Torahs, Um, that Isaiah scroll doesn’t have vowel points either. Vowel points are typically under the letters but they can occur above the letters too, depending on the tradition.

This…if you know Hebrew and you look at the last column, the last few columns, you’ll see certain unusually shaped letters. Like the letter P or pay, and these are very early, it shows they’re copying from an early text.

So, in some ways what I like is trying to understand what they are looking at. Ah, another point of interest is in column 1,2,3,4,5, the sixth column from the end…4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12, thirteenth line from the bottom, you’ll see actually a correction where they cut the text away.

Let’s look at the back and verify, yep. So, they were so serious about the text being right, that they would completely cut it away. It’s just completely counter to what we think about these things. This…this particular one dates to about 1500. So imagine it talking to you about what it’s seen. Imagine it telling you that it hears about Martin Luther and his anti-Semitism. Imagine the people that looked at this and this was the last view of scripture they had before going to Hitler’s ovens. Let me show you one more thing. Denise, could you bring the small scroll here please. And then we’ll take our seat and we’ll see if there are any questions, and I’ve got something spiritual I want to tell you.

Audience Question ...(inaudible)

This is done on animal skin, just like the others. It’s just a different tradition and a different process. Um, by far and away, the most valuable scroll that we have with us and one of the most valuable scrolls in the world. Do you see if open to the brick wall? It’s a Torah scroll, on sheep skin.

It’s not valuable because it’s old--it dates to about 1750--it comes from an interesting area, though. It comes from a place where two hundred and fifty thousand Jews were killed. This Torah--there were records of it from the 18th century, famous teachers wanted to read from it.

We know who owned it before WWII. Did he die in Hitler’s ovens? He was put into a concentration camp. How did the scroll survive?

We know from documented evidence, he hid it in his stuff. So, because of the verified fact of that story, this is of enormous value. We know this survived Hitler too, but not like this. This was brought to Israel and by the man himself. And it was sold, it was given to his son, and then eventually sold to an art collector.

I knew it was in this private collection and was friends with the collector, so I arranged for a collector in Alaska to purchase it. He is not a believer. He is a, um, a cancer doctor. So he sees death all the time. He put it in his office, so when people came in and said there was no hope, he could point to the scroll and say, let me tell you the story of that scroll.

This…this…this….this guy, I should tell you has many troubles….as God reminds you…pray for him, as God reminds you…pray for him.  I was in contact with him in between my early lecture and this lecture.

And he then, ah, donated it to our nonprofit and we got it. I used this lecturing in a Kona, it’s some big…anybody here from Kona? It’s one of your big Thursday night things.

A lady came up after and said that she was from…this was written in. And that her mother was in a concentration camp. And that she had been converted and held the scroll and had her picture taken with it. So, I can’t talk about the twists and turns of God’s provenance, but this has been preserved for you to see. I know that’s true, and I hope it’s to inspire you to know that God’s word will be preserved. He desires you to know him, and he loves you with unfailing love. Now, I’ll see what questions you have and then I’ve got one more thing to tell you, and are we close to being done?

Audience Answer 20 minutes.

Fantastic! Alright go ahead have a seat. And we’ll keep these all open for photographs and everything afterwards. What kind of question do we have. Yes?

Audience Question …(inaudible)…can you tell us the story….private party?

Yes, how in the world did a person in Turkey get something like that? It’s actually very common. Collections were amassed in the nineteen hundreds, nineteen twenties.  Passed down through several generations of a family, usually a big argument over money, and they decide to sell some of it.

The, ah, there are very strict laws that we have to be aware of about antiquities dealing and antiquities sales. So, we vet those carefully to know that we’re not dealing with anything that’s underground. But I’m not ever surprised learning that there’s some collection, of something, somewhere.  Amazing things turn up all over the world.  Yes?

Audience Question …(inaudible)…

(laughs) Well, no. Yeah, they’re corrections.  They’re errors. They’re not intentional errors they’re not malicious errors. Let…let me…let me just ask a question about the text to you. If you had a digital text and you had a printed text, and you had a handwritten text, which one would be easier for me to corrupt?

Somehow, we think it’s the written text but it’s not! It’s the hardest one to mess up and to change around. I’m kind of a sadistic professor. I’ve made my students actually have to determine why the corrections were made. It’s usually they skip a line forward, skip a line back, skip a phrase, skip the next word, simple things.
The scribe is writing away before God. Are you married? And his kid runs through, he skips a word and he goes to the next letter or thing, but they’re non-malicious variations that have been corrected over time.

I, literally, teaching for many years in graduate school and undergraduate, and even now lecturing in Asia for graduate school, I make my students by candlelight copy texts and scripture. And I say to them, if you make one mistake, I will fail the entire class. See, they don’t know me well enough--they think I’m telling the truth but I’m not.

If…If you teach your sbs’, or dts’, or abc’s or whatever you’re teaching, I would strongly recommend giving that as an exercise. Let them copy something. They will…they will get a deep appreciation for how God’s word was preserved.

I had a class tell me, professor we love you we’ll never make a mistake, you’ll see; the first word, the first word was a mistake. So, it’s we understand that this is a human process in which the God of wonders works magnificently in and through us and all our frailty to preserve a word.

And you should leave here going, ah, I’m glad that’s true. And I’m speaking to you out of a pile of evidence; this is exactly how it is. And I think if you’re in a, um, an interfacing with a Muslim culture, that the kind of honesty of that interface will be accepted. Alright, so other questions? Yes.

Audience Question …(inaudible)

Yes, the ancient--that’s the issue. Um, If you mean by dead sea scrolls, …yeah really old, I don’t know what that means, let’s just say it means dead sea scrolls, I don’t know. My grandmother was really old alright…haha…so I don’t know, really old, um, let’s just say dead sea scrolls for starters, of 10,000 fragments in the dead sea scrolls that were found, 1,000 have been identified. And if you go to a text book or read online, they’ll tell you 220-230 are the Bible. And it’s Old Testament we’re talking about, not New Testament.

We know another 30 dead sea scrolls, they’re not even counted in that. And then we know the family that owned the original dead sea scrolls and they have a vault in Zurich and it has more scrolls in it. So, let’s just say there are 300, there’s only one complete one and it’s of Isaiah. They’re many small fragmentary ones. There’s one of Genesis that nobody knows about that has 3 columns. I’ve seen it because the family was trying to sell it.

If you have 70 million dollars you can still get it if you are still interested.  I think I’ll wait till they come down in their price.

Then you have early Greek texts of scripture. If you were to ask me how many fragments of all the ancient languages before 1000. I would say there are over 30,000 Old Testament scriptures. Some are Latin, some are in Syriac, some are in Aramaic.

Of the New Testament there are about 25,000. And because we don’t want to double count, because some are in the same manuscript, I try to advise apologists like Josh McDowell and people I get, there are probably 40,000 manuscripts.

Now, a way of arguing for the accuracy and authority of the Bible. There…there are thousands of copies of the Iliad. Which was--it had nothing to do with Brad Pitt. It…it was the Bible for the classical world.

When we look at the texts of the Iliad, it’s copied with 95% accuracy. So that’s a fun way to argue for the authority and transmission of the Bible, by saying…let me…let’s forget the Bible, how was the Iliad copied? Would any of you go to get your taxes done by someone who failed math? Besides the US Government. No, someone who does accounting is good at math. Someone who copies texts is good at copying text.

So, yeah, questions.

--end of transcript 

Yeah, lots of question.

By:  Lynda Albertson

Image Credit:  Greek Ministry of Culture and Sport

On October 26, 2017 the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports issued a press release regarding the two flagged lekythoi identified at Frieze Masters art fair by Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis.  The two Greek Attic funerary vessels were brought to London earlier this Autumn on consignment by the Basel-based art firm of Jean-David Cahn AG, acting on behalf of the Swiss canton Basel-Stadt.  Tsirogiannis had identified the vessels as being present in the Gianfranco Becchina archive, despite the fact that this passage of provenance in the objects' history had been omitted from the provenance documentation for the marble vases on hand for potential buyers at the London art fair.  

Translated in English, the government statement reads as follows:

The press release, which is quite brief, does not specify when Greece filed their repatriation claim.

Image Left:  Christos Tsirogiannis, Frieze Masters 2017 Image Right: Gianfranco Becchina Archive

On October 22, 2017, the Guardian newspaper reported on two ancient Greek marble lekythoi identified as having once passed through the hands of convicted antiquities dealer Gianfranco Becchina.   The identifications were made via forensic archaeologist Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis with the help of photographs obtained by a concerned individual in London.  Tsirogiannis notified the authorities of his findings on October 16, 2017.

Since 2007, Dr. Tsirogiannis has actively identified illicit antiquities as they have come up for sale on the art market, matching corresponding objects to material found in the confiscated Medici, Becchina, and Symes-Michaelides archives.

During this research, Tsirogiannis informed ARCA that he had found two photocopied images and two Polaroid images of a lekythos which depicts an image of a dead warrior with his relatives, which also has an inscription.  Reviewing copies of the images he sent in confirmation, the photographs of the lekythos show the object in pre-sale condition in two different spaces in storage depots. 

Tsirogiannis also identified a single photograph in the Becchina archive of the second lekythos mentioned in the Guardian article.  This photograph, unlike the others, was a professional black and white image and may have been used by the dealer for sale catalogue purposes.

ARCA has joined two of the archive photographs with their Frieze Masters counterpart to show that Tsirogiannis' identifications match perfectly.

Image Left:  Christos Tsirogiannis, Frieze Masters 2017 Image Right: Gianfranco Becchina Archive

In addition to the photographic evidence, the Becchina archive also contained written documentation from 1988 and 1990 which showed Becchina and George Ortiz as co-owners of the lekythos, with the image and inscription. One of those documents also referenced the object in an earlier 1977 Becchina list of antiquities.

The two lekythoi were brought to London this Autumn on consignment – price “upon request” by the Basel-based art firm Jean-David Cahn AG, a gallery which specializes in ancient Greek and Roman art. 

They were exhibited in Regent's Park during Frieze Masters, a Frieze London spin-off art fair that features hundreds of leading modern and historical galleries from around the world, many with pricey, museum quality objects.  Both objects did not sell. 

According to Guardian journalist, Howard Swains, the consignor of the two lekythoi is the Swiss canton of Basel-Stadt.  Each canton in Switzerland has its own constitution, legislature, government, and courts and in this case it appears that the Basel-Stadt judiciary had greenlighted the brokering of the objects through the Swiss intermediary as part of their liquidation of Becchina's remaining unclaimed art assets from his business dealings in Basel.

Sixteen years earlier, Italian authorities had requested assistance from Swiss law enforcement in their longstanding investigation into Gianfranco Becchina's operations.  As a result of the joint Italian-Swiss operation, an international illicit trafficking ring was dismantled and 5,800 objects were seized from three Becchina warehouses under suspicion of having been plundered.

The largest portion of these ancient objects were repatriated to Italy after a lengthy identification process.  Unfortunately, hundreds of orphaned objects, whose countries of origin were not verified, remained in limbo, under the jurisdiction of the Swiss authorities.

It is important to note that in agreeing to broker the sale of the lekythoi in London, Jean-David Cahn AG elected to omit the Becchina and Ortiz passages in the object documentation published for the Frieze Masters event.  That literature can be seen in the photos below.  While each carries a lengthy description of the object, there is only spartan mention of their provenance, stating only “Formerly Swiss art market, October 1977.”



As Dr. David Gill points out, "These two items are objects that were created in Attica for display in Attic cemeteries. They are from Greek, not Italian, soil."

While it remains unclear if the Greek authorities know about these two particular antiquities, and if they somehow failed to file a claim at the time of their seizure,  the absence of any documentable provenance is a strong indicator that both artifacts, orphaned or not, were acquired through individuals connected with Becchina's trafficking network.

The fact that antiquities dealers continue to market antiquities, selectively omitting problematic passages in an object's provenance is a longstanding issue.  In cases like these, it also underscores why many heritage protection experts — who monitor the antiquities trade and antiquities trafficking — believe the art market is unwilling or incapable of policing itself, especially if the seller believes that sharing the object's complete history might diminish its chances of finding a buyer.

Also worthy of note:

In 2006, Jean-David Cahn voluntarily returned a marble male head from its stock which had been stolen from the Temple of Eshmun in Lebanon.

Excerpt from the State of New York Application for Turnover - Bulls-Head-Case

In 2007, Jean-David Cahn returned a marble statue of the Lykeios Apollo that had been stolen from the archaeological site of Gortyna in Crete in 1991. 

Then in 2008, after a series of negotiations, Jean-David Cahn returned a different Attic marble funerary lekythos, also identified by Christos Tsirogiannis, to Greece as part of an out-of-court settlement.  That object had been pinpointed during the TEFAF Maastrict art fair in March 2007.

  

While the heritage community continues to advocate strongly for responsible collecting and informed due diligence from collectors before they make purchases as a means of curbing the trade in looted artifacts, one has to also ask what the ethical responsibility of dealers and governments is, who knowingly place questionable origin objects up for sale, intentionally misleading potential buyers by not giving them all the collecting history information at their disposal.

Hypothetically Speaking...

What if a buyer had been interested in purchasing either of these antiquities?

Somewhere down the road, said buyer might find themselves in the awkward position of not being able to donate, or sell, or recoup their previous investment because the potentially illicit origin of the object was not made clear to them at the time of purchase.

Food for thought.

By: Lynda Albertson

In deference to new readers of the ARCA blog, who may not be as familiar with  the world’s largest accumulation of illicit antiquities, ARCA has obtained the permission of London journalist Howard Swains to republish his Medium article, London’s Loot: The Legacy of Robin Symes, in its entirety. 

Swains is a journalist and feature writer with experience across print and digital titles, including The Times, the Guardian, Independent, Newsweek, the Sunday Times Magazine and CNN.

London’s Loot: The Legacy of Robin Symes

How the world’s largest accumulation of illicit antiquities got stuck in the UK, and why nobody can shift them

One morning towards the end of January last year, a white truck bearing the insignia of an Italian removals firm pulled out of the Geneva Freeport in Switzerland and began a 560-mile journey to Rome. By the time it had traversed the Alps and reached the Italian capital, the truck had shaken off its dusting of snow but had attracted a convoy of two motorcycles and two saloon cars, each topped with a flashing blue light.

The motorcade pulled up in the Trastevere district, outside the barracks of the specialist art squad of the Carabinieri, the largest such division of a national police force in the world. Officers in stiff military-style uniforms, with black leather gloves and dark peaked caps, helped remove 45 wooden storage crates from the truck, which they gradually began to unpack.

Video Credit: Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale 

“Operazione Antiche Dimore” Rome, 22 marzo 2016

A few weeks later, the world’s press mingled around those crates with the Italian Minister of Culture, the Swiss ambassador to Italy and high-ranking national prosecutors. The crates’ contents were now balanced on top or spilled beside, as though in a shabby-chic gallery. 

To the untrained eye, many of the exhibits may have seemed unremarkable: fragments of vases and frescos; detached statue heads and limbs. But there was no mistaking the quality of the centrepiece — and not only because of the uniformed Carabinieri officers posing proudly for photographs beside it.

The reclining figures of an elderly man and a young woman, close to life-size and carved from Etruscan terracotta, formed the lids to two sarcophagi, dating from the second century B.C. The rest of the material was of similar age, and was, in fact, of comparable significance: Some of the frescos in the haul were thought to have been ripped from temple walls near Pompeii, or from the UNESCO-listed necropolises of Cerveteri, near Rome.

This was loot — thousands of pieces of it — most likely excavated inexpertly, in the dead of night, from Italian soil some time in the 1970s or 80s. It had then been on an uncertain, smuggled journey out of Italy and into Switzerland, via a skilled but illicit restorer’s workshop. The motorcade that swept it back to Rome was part of its ceremonial repatriation, at least 16 years since its clandestine incarceration in Geneva.

The Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA) described the items as “an Ali Baba’s cave-worthy hoard of Roman and Etruscan treasures”. The press persuaded reluctant officials to attach a monetary figure to the artefacts: They were priceless, of course, but had a market value of perhaps €9 million to those who might want to profit from such things.

My interpreter pointed to one of the sarcophagus lids and said, “You see this only under glass in a museum.” Had best-laid plans not been interrupted, that is exactly where it might have one day appeared: the endpoint of a sophisticated trafficking network that, throughout the latter part of the 20th century, transformed invaluable examples of cultural heritage into gallery pieces for the world’s most prestigious museums and private collections.

The individual most responsible for the gathering in Rome was also the man most notable by his absence. A British former antiquities dealer named Robin Symes was the sole suspect for having once rented the storeroom in the Geneva Freeport from which the loot had now been liberated. Symes’s handwriting was on the outside of the packaging crates; the pages of the British newspapers and the Antiques Trade Gazette that wrapped some objects were almost certainly previously read by him. His fingerprints were all over this stuff.

Once among the world’s richest and most celebrated antiquities dealers, Symes has spent the past decade as a disgraced bankrupt, exposed as a former linchpin in the networks that once traded almost with impunity in such material. But for all Symes’s proven crooked dealings, the full extent of his hidden plunder has still not yet been revealed. Furthermore, although Symes, who is now in his mid-70s, spent seven months in prison for contempt of court in 2005, he has never stood trial for illicit antiquities trading, nor been forced to reveal where he might have squirreled further contraband.

Another cache of Symes’s former stock — possibly the largest known accumulation of illicit antiquities in the world — has been stuck in a legal impasse in London for 14 years. The legacy of his known dealings is now the focus of a complicated liquidation, blighted by squabbles between at least three governments and allegations of procedural impropriety.

The ministries of culture in both Italy and Greece say that material stuck in the U.K. belongs to them, and have lodged appeals for its return. Their stance is supported by prominent archaeologists, whose academic endeavours have long been undermined by tomb-raiders and illicit excavators, turning a profit from desecrating cultural sites. Yet those with a stake in Symes’s former business, as well as a number of creditors, appear to support the sale of the former trader’s stock, insistent that there is insufficient proof of ownership to warrant giving it up.

At a time when the looting and destruction of cultural heritage has never been more prominent, archaeologists await further details not only of the items Symes may have spirited away, but the methods by which he was able to profit for so long from the sale of illegally excavated material. Everyone was talking about the same absent character in Rome, as they sometimes also do in London, Cambridge and Athens. In short, what is still to be uncovered from Symes’s former scheming? And, for that matter, where is he?

---

Robin Symes’s established early biography runs as follows: He was born in Oxfordshire, England, in 1939, and suffered early tragedy when his mother was murdered when he was a toddler. There are few other details about his childhood and schooling, but Symes married at 21 and had two sons, born in 1961 and 63.

At that time, he was working as a lowly antiquities trader with a shop on London’s Kings Road. But his life deviated sharply from what had seemed to be its likely path when Symes met the handsome Christo Michaelides, a Greek heir to a family of shipping magnates, some time in the 1960s. Michaelides was in his early 20s, five years Symes’s junior, but the pair immediately formed a close relationship that endured for the next 30 years.

Symes divorced and Michaelides separated from his girlfriend. Although they never openly declared that they were a romantic couple, almost all acquaintances consider the men to have been partners in both life and business, reportedly referred to as “the Symeses”. Their business dealings were apparently bolstered by the almost unlimited finances available to them from Michaelides’s family, and they became the most revered dealers about town.

By the time Symes first came to the attention of the national press in 1979, the level of his business was such that The New York Times reported on his purchase of a Roman glass bowl at Sotheby’s in London for $1.04 million. A decade later, Symes appeared in the Times’s real estate pages, in the process of selling the so-called “Rockefeller Guest House” on East 52nd Street in Manhattan which he had owned for 11 years. “I was here 20 days a year,” he laments as the reason for the sale of the property, designed in 1949 by Philip Johnson for Blanchette Rockefeller. He manages, however, to slip in an anecdote about Greta Garbo once ringing the bell, looking for Johnson. The house sold for $3.2 million.

“Symes acquired a lifestyle to match his success in the antiquities business,” wrote Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini in their 2007 book The Medici Conspiracy. “With Christo he had homes in London, New York, Athens, and Schinnoussa [sic], a small island across the water from Naxos…Symes, who doesn’t drive, was always chauffeured in a silver Rolls Royce or a maroon Bentley.”

Symes and Michaelides lived the high life. They had a gallery in the St James’s district of London; their house in Chelsea had a sunken swimming pool, ringed by exceptional statues; the Schinoussa residence was a sprawling estate across a peninsula, surrounded by the deep blue of the Mediterranean sea.

Furthermore, Symes was a trustee of the British Museum and regularly hob-nobbed with the world’s leading curators. He seemed to have access to the finest antiquities of Greek, Italian, Egyptian and Asian origin, buying and selling through Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams; placing items in national museums across the world.

“This was before the trustees of the British Museum had rather rumbled the fact that they were buying a lot of material that had recently been looted,” says Lord Colin Renfrew, who is among Britain’s leading archaeologists and is himself a former British Museum trustee. The Museum adopted a new code of acquisitions under the directorship of Robert Anderson, between 1992 and 2002. “That was when Robin Symes was no longer so welcome at cocktail parties at the British Museum, but he had been up to that time,” Renfrew says.

Throughout the 1990s, several investigations moved into top gear in Italy, Greece and the United States into an apparent trafficking network of antiquities. The Metropolitan Museum in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles were only two of the high-profile institutions implicated in having received looted material that had passed through the hands of an Italian dealer named Giacomo Medici.

As detailed in great depth in Watson and Todeschini’s 2007 book, the eponymous Medici controlled a team of “tombaroli”, or tomb raiders, which fed material via a number of well-connected fences, including Symes, to auction rooms and galleries. Symes not only shared a business address with Medici in Geneva, but many of the pieces at the centre of the investigations clearly gained some of their “legitimacy” from once being in the British dealer’s possession. This became especially true after Symes had placed them in museum collections or major auctions, “washing” the items of their illicit past.

In 1988, Symes sold a statue believed to be a 5th century B.C. depiction of Aphrodite to the Getty museum for $18 million. He said it had been in the collection of a Swiss supermarket magnate since the 1930s, and had paperwork to that effect. But the documentation was forged; the statue had actually been looted in Morgantina, Italy, then trafficked via Geneva to London. Experts eventually decided the figure was most likely not Aphrodite, but the misidentification of the character it depicted was far less serious than the exposure of its fraudulent provenance. By the time the statue was sent back from Los Angeles to Italy in 2007, the museum world was in turmoil and mired in similar scandals.

In the opinions of many archaeologists and prosecutors who have studied their activities, the global Symes operation was more significant than that of Medici, whose business was confined to Italy.

“Symes was the biggest illicit antiquities dealer, with Christo Michaelides, in modern times,” says Christos Tsirogiannis, a Greek forensic archaeologist based in Cambridge, who has spent the past decade attempting to unravel the extent of Symes’s dealings and his place in what amounts to a vast global chain. “One can only imagine in the 25-plus year career of Symes and Michaelides how many objects they held and sold if their remains are 17,000 objects of the highest quality from nearly all, if not all, ancient civilisations.”

That remainder — which some people suggest may be as many as 17,000 objects — is what became confined to a number of warehouses in the London area in late 2003. They are the documented leftovers after Symes’s empire collapsed dramatically towards the end of the 20th century.

At a dinner party in Italy in July 1999, Michaelides slipped down some steps, hit his head on a radiator and died from his injuries the following day. As Michaelides’s relatives — the Papadimitriou family — grieved, they also fell into bitter dispute with Symes over the deceased’s estate. (In some form, this dispute remains ongoing.) Symes claimed that the principal business, named Robin Symes Limited (RSL), was his alone and that Michaelides was a mere employee. The Papadimitrious insisted they were entitled to half of its assets as Michaelides was an equal partner. The furious family brought a civil case against Symes in London’s High Court at which he would pay dearly for his hubris in his professional and legal dealings.

Michaelides, left, and Symes hugely under-reported the extent of his “legitimate” business matters in a bid to avoid a costly settlement with Michaelides’s estate. But the Papadimitrious’ legal team hired private detectives to track him across the world. Symes said he had five warehouses of stock; the detectives uncovered around 30. He then incensed the judge, Justice Peter Smith, with a number of lies and diversionary tactics, in particular misreporting the nature of two major sales at a time when he was obliged to share full details of his deals with the court.

Symes said he sold a statue to a company in Wyoming for $1.6 million. The company proved not to exist, and he actually sold it to the Qatari collector Sheikh al-Thani for $4.5 million. He sold a second statue to the Sheikh for $8 million, lodging the money in Liechtenstein, when he reported to the court he sold it for $3 million. (He latterly also sold a furniture collection for $14 million, $10 million more than he reported. He put the money in a bank in Gibraltar.) It turned a civil trial into a criminal conviction.

After throwing out a late claim that Symes was mentally unfit to stand trial, skewering the testimony of Symes’s personal doctor on the stand, Justice Smith sentenced Symes to two years imprisonment for contempt of court. He went to Pentonville Prison in north London, from where he was released after seven months.

By then, having been unable to pay legal costs of up to £5 million, he declared himself bankrupt and receivers seized the official stock of RSL that could be located and then handed it to liquidators. Symes’s own figures, which are possibly inflated, puts the stock’s value at £125 million.

It is this stock that continues to cause controversy and keeps Symes under discussion in the U.K., Italy and Greece. The Papadimitriou family lodged claims of $50 million on the dissolved company, representing Michaelides’s share. Britain’s Inland Revenue was the largest listed creditor, claiming £40.3 million (nearly $70 million in December 2003) in unpaid tax.

Given the nature of Symes’s dealings, the stock almost certainly contains items of highly dubious provenance, and the cultural ministries of at least Italy and Greece have submitted requests for illegally trafficked items to be returned to them. Yet the stock is also the principal asset through which the liquidators could get anywhere near raising the required capital to satisfy creditors. Arguments over it have come to reflect many of the common disputes in dealing with antiquities: there are apparently unresolvable issues over transparency, provenance and proof of ownership. There are also complaints of a lack of cooperation between jurisdictions, and issues with differing laws between countries.

In contrast with stolen material, which might be documented and will be missed if it vanishes, illegally excavated items, by their very nature, are unknown to anybody before the point that they are dug up. Unscrupulous antiquities traders and collectors have long insisted disputed pieces were merely located in dusty attics or storerooms, where they had lain untouched for centuries. Until the UK passed the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act in 2003, which introduced the notion of a “tainted cultural item” and shifted the burden of proof to the dealer, it would have been all but impossible to gain a conviction in criminal court for trading in looted property.

Symes accumulated his stock prior to 2003, but the liquidators, a British firm named BDO, are now operating under the closer scrutiny of the modern era, and also since the exposés that clearly linked Symes to looted property. Nonetheless, in 2013, 10 years after the liquidation began, rumours began circulating within the industry that items from the RSL stock were being sold in the Middle East, now the home of some of the wealthiest private collectors of antiquities. Since HMRC, the British government’s tax and revenue service, was the largest creditor with claims on the company, an easy narrative emerged: Was the British government selling looted cultural property to pay back taxes?

Paolo Ferri, a former district judge in Italy, who led the successful prosecution of Medici, told me that he considered any sales of material from the company’s frozen stock was “very scandalous”. He says, “They are selling those items for tax purposes. It’s equal to selling drugs to recover taxes.”

Although now retired, Ferri keeps a keen eye on developments related to Medici’s former associates, and recalls several run-ins with both Symes and the British authorities. Ferri brought Symes as a witness in the Medici trial, but was unable to persuade British police to collect sufficient evidence to put him in the dock. (Before the passing of the 2003 law, British police had no reason to pursue Symes.)

Every six months since December 2004, the liquidators of RSL have filed a report with Companies House, which is the British government’s registrar of corporate documentation. The reports are a matter of public record but only became freely available in June 2015, when Companies House re-launched its website. Although not especially detailed, the documents nonetheless offer the only overview of business matters pertaining to the frozen RSL stock, split between operations in both the United Kingdom and USA.

In the early months and years following the liquidators’ appointment, “realisations” (i.e., incoming payments) include the sale of property, furniture and motor vehicles, as well as a number of sales of unspecified antiquities to buyers in London, Switzerland and the USA. “Disbursements” (i.e., outgoings) include storage and security costs, as well as mounting legal and administrative fees.

The number of realisations have slowed in recent years, but the RSL documents clearly show that there have been numerous sales from the company’s stock. A variation on the name Sheikh al-Thani appears as the purchaser of at least five consignments, costing £326,000, £248,000, £143,300, £127,750 and £57,494 between 2007 and 2010, and there are two entries from January 2014, of £150,000 and £188,000, bearing only the word “Sheikh”. (Al-Thani was the buyer of the material that Symes misreported to the High Court and resulted in his contempt action.)

Other listed buyers include a sizeable list of British and American dealers and collectors, who may be either buying for themselves or as agents for other unknown parties. In June 2015, a consignment costing £52,900 went to a London antiquities trader. The same dealer bought an unspecified consignment in November 2015 for £75,000. They represent the most recent confirmed sales.

By some measure, the largest single sale is listed from November 2008, where two entries apparently refer to the sale of an item described only as “Head of K”. (Other sales rarely have even this much detail.) It appears to have fetched £875,000 ($1.25 million), which remains a significant amount for an antiquity.

None of the dealers I contacted would talk on the record about their purchases from the RSL stock. BDO has also never commented on the liquidation of RSL and turned down my request for an interview. There is no clear evidence that any of the transactions are improper: The argument runs that Symes did not deal only in illicit objects and the company’s stock would also include plenty of material that was not subject to proprietary claims. However, only a relatively small number of the sales have taken place in a public auction, where it might reasonably be expected they would fetch the highest price. This lack of transparency continues to infuriate those who condemn the opaque nature of the antiquities trade, while archaeologists contend that ethical dealers would reject on principle any stock that had once been handled by Symes. They say that the refusal to publicise the details of the items makes it impossible to determine their true provenance, nor where they will end up.

Few people have a better idea than Tsirogiannis about the true nature of Symes’s dealings. In 2006, while working for the Greek Cultural Ministry, he accompanied Greek police in a raid on the property in Schinoussa that uncovered, among other valuable objects, a photographic archive of around 1,300 items that had once been in Symes’s hands. Similar photographic archives were found in the Geneva offices of Medici and a fellow dealer named Gianfranco Becchina, often showing antiquities fresh from the ground, still with soil encrustations on them.

These photographic archives are as close to a smoking gun as investigators get in this field, and access to them is closely restricted. Forensic archaeologists working in Italy used the Medici and Becchina archive to secure convictions against the two former dealers, proving they had sold illicit material. Meanwhile Tsirogiannis, who is one of few people outside a police department or government ministry with full access to the archives, still scours the catalogues of antiquities auctions and museum shelves and regularly identifies items that are depicted, pre-restoration, as recently being in the hands of the convicted dealers.

I took a number of photographs of the seized Symes stock displayed at the press conference in Rome and forwarded them to Tsirogiannis. The Carabinieri also released an official video showing their officers handling various objects found in Geneva. We met in Cambridge soon after, when Tsirogiannis showed me 12 positive matches he had made between items in the photographs from Rome and those previously in the possession of Medici or in the seized Schinoussa archive. The items in my pictures, as discovered in the storage crates hidden by Symes, were clean and restored; ready for sale in a high-end gallery. The same items in the Polaroids from the Medici and Schinoussa archives were cracked, dirty and often incomplete, broken apart to facilitate easy transportation. The identifications proved beyond any doubt that Symes dealt habitually in loot. This much had been agreed by the Italian and Swiss authorities as a precursor to the repatriations.

Tsirogiannis has repeatedly offered his services to the liquidators, both directly and via the Metropolitan Police, to examine the RSL stock in London and determine what among it is obviously illicit. The offers have consistently been ignored, leading Tsirogiannis to the assumption that the liquidators would rather sell the items than return them. (The liquidators did not respond to these accusations.)

Allegations of impropriety are sternly rejected by James Ede, a British antiquities dealer and former chairman of the International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art, who has been working with BDO as a valuer and industry expert. Ede is a frequent commentator on the antiquities trade, often providing the lone voice in defence of an industry that he says has cleaned up a great deal since Symes’s heyday.

Ede denies that the liquidation is being conducted behind a shroud of secrecy. He told me in an email that “the liquidation is being carried out entirely properly with due reference to all interested parties”. He agreed during a subsequent telephone conversation that his italics suggested a concern for the creditors on the RSL account who have still not seen even a small fraction of the money they have claimed.

Ede also says, however, that he is not permitted to answer questions about the contents of the warehouses, the complexities of the issues facing the liquidators, nor to address the particularly controversial subject of sales. “There is a perfectly reasonable desire sometimes to have confidentiality in ones business dealings, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” he says.

The name of Ede’s company, Charles Ede Ltd., which was established by James Ede’s father, features prominently on the liquidators’ documents at Companies House, most notably alongside the “Head of K” sale. However, Ede told me that neither he nor his company has made any purchases from the stock, leaving it unclear why the company name would appear in the “Realisations” column. The implication appears to be that the object has gone to a third party, who would rather not appear on official documentation.

One dealer with close knowledge of sales from the stock, but who did not want to talk on the record, told me that sales are accompanied with long and detailed paperwork indemnifying BDO against subsequent proprietary claims. Wherever the items are ending up — and nobody was prepared to speculate — the liquidators appear to be making sure that they do not latterly face legal reprisals, should allegations emerge that cast doubt on the material’s provenance.

The liquidation clearly still has some way to go. Over 17 years, the documents show total disbursements from the RSL account of approximately £13.35 million and realisations of £13.72 million, a net gain of slightly less than £400,000. In the 12 years since the liquidators have been submitting invoices, fees for their services run to more than £3 million.

The documents also suggest that significant material still appears to be in the liquidators’ possession. The most recent filings, covering the 12 months up to June 2017, reveal £34,356 was spent on insurance and £63,421 (plus VAT) went on storage. Fees from previous years are higher, but the general trend points to an attempt to consolidate the hoard in fewer locations. (US dollar exchange rates, which will have fluctuated, were calculated in September of this year.)

The contents of the warehouses remain a mystery to all but a select few. In Rome, I visited an Italian prosecutor named Maurizio Fiorilli, who now represents the Italian state in its negotiations with BDO over the RSL stock. Italy claims that there are items in the warehouses that were looted from its soil and therefore should be returned to the country. Fiorilli, like his friend and former colleague Paolo Ferri, is a veteran of battles to protect Italian cultural heritage and keeps on his bookshelf a photograph of the two men posing beside the so-called “Euphronios krater,” one of the most exquisite — and notorious — antiquities in existence.

The krater, which is a terracotta vase-cum-bowl used for mixing wine and water in the ancient world, is the only known complete example decorated by the master painter and potter known as Euphronios, who was active in Athens between 520–480 B.C. In 1972, the Metropolitan Museum in New York bought the krater from an American dealer named Robert Hecht for $1 million, which was then a record for an antiquity. However, Hecht had fudged the provenance documentation, disguising that he had obtained it from Giacomo Medici. After a lengthy legal tussle, in which Fiorilli was prominent, the museum gave up the krater in 2006.

Fiorilli’s discussions with BDO over the Symes hoard focus specifically on a list of around 1,000 objects submitted by the liquidators to the Italian Cultural Ministry as being potentially of interest. Fiorilli says he knows of no sales from this specific list of disputed items, but details a frustrating series of obstacles and delays that have drawn out negotiations and precluded any repatriations.

In October 2007, Fiorilli was granted access to some of the warehouses holding the RSL stock, which he toured in the company of lawyers of the liquidators, an appointed gallery expert and an officer from the Metropolitan Police. Fiorilli says that what had been scheduled to be a three-day visit was cut short, without explanation, at the end of the first day. He says he was also asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement that prohibits him from answering specific questions about what he saw.

Nonetheless, Fiorilli invited me to look at the computer screen in his office as he opened a folder of 421 photographs labelled “Symes Depository”. He flicked apparently at random through images of statue fragments, small figurines, vases and reliefs; a collection not dissimilar to the items displayed at the Carabinieri’s press conference. One scrap of paper bore the name “Von Bothmer”, almost certainly Dietrich Von Bothmer, who was formerly a curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, with a specialisation in Etruscan vases. Fiorilli also said he saw closed boxes in the warehouses that seemed to have come from the Met, but was not permitted to open them. Another fragment of paper bore the single, hand-written word, “Euphronios”. Fiorilli shrugged when I asked what it might refer to.

“The negotiations were interrupted several times because of more and more questions by liquidators and ever new demands for a revision of what has been agreed,” Fiorilli says. “The negotiations have lasted for nine years and the liquidators have had evidence for over seven years that the objects included in the lists provided by them belong to the Italian cultural heritage.” (This conversation took place in April 2016.)

Lord Renfrew openly pondered whether any sales from the RSL stock could be regarded as in violation of the 2003 law that prohibits dealing in “tainted” material. Renfrew, who sits in the House of Lords in the British parliament, is keen for the country’s lawmakers to step in and halt the sales on behalf of the Inland Revenue. “The British government needs to be prodded to come into the open on all this shady dealing,” Lord Renfrew told me. “It’s not clear they’re breaking the law but they really are behaving unethically, even by the government’s own ethical standards.”

I attempted to speak with representatives of the Department for Culture Media & Sport in both the present and former governments, but no one admitted any knowledge of the Symes warehouses nor discussions to repatriate items.

According to a professional liquidator I interviewed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as she is not permitted to comment on specific cases, it is not quite accurate to say that any sales from the stock will go directly to pay taxes. Although HMRC is owed more than £40 million from the dissolved company, it is only one of a number of creditors and will receive no preferential treatment. However, the liquidator questioned the lack of public auctions, and expressed her surprise that the impasse could last this long with no obvious benefactor.

The London-based lawyers representing the estate of Christo Michaelides told me that they consider matters to be largely out of their hands. They have a number of cost orders outstanding but do not expect significant, if any, financial remuneration, even though the Papadimitriou family are known to have spent many millions in pursuing Symes. The family also remains the second-largest creditors with claims on the RSL stock and, in 2005, the family’s Greek lawyer told a documentary that if expenses began to escalate “it will be obliged to liquidate the objects in auctions.”

The London lawyers said these matters were entirely in the hands of the liquidators. Although they keep a “watchful eye” on activities related to Symes and RSL, they have little contact with BDO beyond receiving a letter once every six months.

More pertinently, perhaps, Fiorilli says that the delays in permitting the tainted material to return to Italy has allowed the statute of limitations to pass on any crimes allegedly perpetrated by Symes. Both Ferri and Fiorilli have previously been keen to prosecute Symes in Italy for crimes related to looting, smuggling and theft but the law requires key evidence to be in the country in order to secure a conviction. Referring to crucial documentation, photographs and items currently in the possession of BDO, Fiorilli told me, “If we had this, in the time limit, Symes would go to jail.” He added, “The interest of the Italian Government was and is exclusively cultural. The interest of the liquidators is purely commercial.”

I received conflicting reports during the reporting of this story as to whether Symes remains a wanted man. Tsirogiannis showed me an email sent by Fiorilli in September 2013 in which the Italian prosecutor said he had heard that the Greek government had issued a warrant for Symes’s arrest. The Greek ministry of culture told me that they have assembled a committee to oversee all matters pertaining to Symes, including its claims on the RSL stock. But the ministry had still not replied to my written questions more than 18 months after I first submitted them, despite a long email correspondence with its press department. Fiorilli did not offer further comment on this specific point.

London’s Metropolitan Police told me that it has “no current investigations in this matter”, even though Tsirogiannis showed me another email in which the head of the force’s recently-disbanded Art and Antiques Unit asked him whether he knew of any tainted antiquities anywhere in London. In his reply, Tsirogiannis mentioned the RSL warehouses, which he is certain contain numerous illicit items. The email chain ended there.

Renfrew is now the co-chair of an All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, which has been established in the British parliament in response to reports of recently looted material from Iraq and Syria arriving on the domestic antiquities market. Both Renfrew and Tsirogiannis have made specific mention to Symes in the group’s meetings, which have entered the official minutes. They note that the absence of claims on the RSL stock from Iraq and Syria does not mean looted property from those countries is not already in the UK, but it would pre-date the Bashar al-Assad and ISIS era.

The archaeologists remain angry that the disputes over the RSL stock have denied authorities the opportunity of fully exploring the world in which Symes operated, leaving the market murky enough, in their opinion, that illicit material can still find a way through the networks.

“Because of the lack of cooperation, communication among various stakeholders, authorities, governments, museums and so on, we will never know any of these different sectors regarding Symes’s activities,” Tsirogiannis says. “This is our only chance…to understand and highlight a small part of this huge area that is called ‘antiquities market’…Either we use this evidence and we use it quickly, now, or we are losing the best opportunity we ever had.”

Understanding the illicit trade is seen by archaeologists as more important even than the repatriation of items. As with all improperly excavated objects, the damage is already done the moment they are taken out of the place they had lain for thousands of years. The value to research lies in understanding how the items were used in antiquity; clandestine excavation immediately eliminates all possibility for contextual analysis. To archaeologists any residual “beauty” of an item is an irrelevance.

The unrest in the Middle East of recent decades — in particular the plundering of Syria and Iraq by all of ISIS, other rebel groups and troops loyal to Bashar al-Assad — will almost certainly fuel a fresh interest in antiquities, and flood a new market. Archaeologists contend that many of the smuggling networks established in Symes’s era remain intact, and say that politicians’ recent rhetoric condemning cultural destruction is empty given their unwillingness to deal adequately with items previously stolen from overseas territories.

Symes himself is no longer considered a prime target. I encountered limited enthusiasm from archaeologists and authorities alike to see the former dealer return to the dock. The general consensus is that other warehouses are likely still scattered across Europe and the USA, but that even he will have no idea where. Most people I spoke with seemed to suggest belated prosecution, even if it were possible, would serve little purpose.

One dealer told me he heard that Symes now lived “above a fish and chip shop”. Another said he’d heard rumours that Symes was “close to death”. The lawyers representing the Michaelides estate said they last served papers on Symes in 2010 when he was living behind a church in east London, occupying himself with copper etchings. They said he had now moved.

Peter Watson spoke to Symes while reporting The Medici Conspiracy in 2006, and Symes also agreed to meet a Greek documentary film crew at his lawyers’ office in the same year, but pulled out of the interview at the last moment. The documentary crew filmed the last known pictures of him arriving to the lawyer’s London office — a healthy-seeming, smart man in a dark suit jacket, with short, grey hair, clutching a bag under one arm, with an overcoat draped over the other — before vanishing inside.

Screenshot from Greek documentary “The New Files”

A former Scotland Yard detective named Dick Ellis, who had previously interviewed Symes in the 1990s, says he believed the former dealer was now living “among friends”. Ellis says that he would be able to locate Symes quite easily if anybody had a will, and the finances, to do so. (Symes’s former wife died in 1995 and one of his sons two years later. His surviving son, Innes, runs a construction company in Bristol, but told a Daily Mail reporter in February 2016 that he had not seen his father for 10 years.)

A tour of Symes’s London is a lonely exercise these days. His former gallery in the affluent St James’s district in the centre of the city is now a private office, from which the marble-effect plate bearing the former tenant’s name has long been removed. His preferred warehouse in Battersea, close to the former smugglers’ passages that flanked the River Thames in its mercantile pomp, is a characterless structure on a modern trading estate behind fierce anti-climb railings. Symes once brought the curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum there to show her the disputed Aphrodite statue ahead of its $18 million sale.

Meanwhile the residence in Chelsea, which Symes shared with Michaelides, still oozes wealth from behind its shuttered windows and wrought-iron fence. But it is an impenetrable compound, where Symes would be most unwelcome: The name on the most recent electoral register for the adjacent property is Nicolas Papadimitriou, Michaelides’s brother-in-law, who financed the civil litigation that sent Symes to prison.

Symes gave a remarkable interview to the Los Angeles Times from his cell in Pentonville in 2005, in which he continued to portray himself as some kind of rock-star. Symes described himself as a “legend” and remembers the moment an unknown “fan” planted a kiss on his mouth in a nightclub, for no reason beyond the fact that “You are Robin Symes…You’re to the world of art dealers what the Beatles are to music.”

Wherever he is now, Symes’s rock-star days are over. But the squabbles over his unfortunate legacy remain fresh, and maybe more relevant to contemporary culture than ever before.